From Chimpanzees to Institutions

In the article “When the Chimpanzee Awakens Within Us” (Covalent Bond, 2025), your humble servant convincingly showed that mass human behavior directly depends on biological predispositions and, most importantly, the current environment. Genetic traits, the level of threat, the feeling of safety — all of these affect which behavioral strategies become activated in society: tendencies toward aggression or altruism, domination or trust. These mechanisms, inherited from our primate ancestors, manifest at the community level and find institutional expression in forms of power, types of governance, and social structures.

Understanding such deep interconnections between biology and society helps to reveal the fundamental causes of social dynamics and the possible paths of its transformation. In this regard, it is useful to examine three major societal models: the patrimonial society, the political nationhood, and civil society. Each represents a different way of organizing the social order and relating the individual to law, tradition, and authority. This classification allows for a deeper understanding of how fear or security, dominance or trust become systemic elements — just as, in the author’s account of chimpanzees and bonobos, behavioral strategies are shaped by environmental conditions.

The Power of Tradition: Patrimonial Society

As Max Weber showed, a patrimonial society is based on personal authority, tradition, and devotion. Here, law matters only insofar as it is sanctioned by the elder, spiritual leader, or patron. Institutional norms are replaced by customs, and loyalty is determined not by civic belonging, but by personal ties. This is a society where aggression and dominance are socially accepted survival strategies, especially under conditions of chronic instability. As with the chimpanzees described by the author in the above-mentioned article, when threatened, hierarchy, territoriality, and exclusivity come to the fore. In such circumstances, people gravitate toward a “strong hand,” and order is built on loyalty, not on universal rules.

Law as the Foundation of Unity: Political Nationhood

In contrast stands the model of political nationhood: citizens are united not by blood or faith, but by recognition of a common legal system. These are not primates, but political subjects. When the environment is stable and safe, people tend to accept the rules and institutions of the game, as they work in their favor. Political nationhood requires social trust — but that trust is fragile and evaporates under threat. This model is only possible in conditions of relative abundance and predictability — like with the bonobos in the author’s article: it is precisely the peaceful and resource-rich environment that makes coordinated and rational co-existence of a large collective possible.

Self-Organization and Empathy: Civil Society

If political nationhood provides the backbone of statehood, civil society provides its soul. It is the place where public meaning is created, decisions of authorities are contested, and a culture of solidarity is cultivated. What peaceful bonobos do instinctively, citizens do consciously: they initiate discussions, support one another, unite to defend rights. It is within civil society that horizontal ties are formed — not “leader and subordinate,” but “citizen and citizen.” This is a society capable of resisting a regression into patrimonialism — provided that basic environmental stability is preserved.

The Old is Always Contemporary

Today, more and more states — not surprisingly, given international relations of the past ten years — are drawn to a return to patrimonial society, though in a new form. That is, if they ever left it at all. A sort of neo-patrimonialism. It looks democratic, it feels like freedom everywhere — but its backbone is the same old, familiar patrimonialism. 

And frankly, it’s very attractive. Admit it, it’s quite nice when you — a limited circle of people who de facto hold exclusive power — collect taxes, decide how to allocate all finances, and set your own rules of the game. You have courtiers who are loyal to the core and will do anything for you, even give their lives. And then — there’s everyone else. The rest, as throughout human history, simply adapt.

Yes, with modern innovations and the democracy of the past few decades — it’s a little trickier than before. But actually, not as hard as it seems. All it really takes is keeping at least 30% of the population in a state of anxiety.

How Do Authoritarian and Totalitarian Regimes Use Human Biological Mechanisms to Maintain a Constant Sense of Threat in Society?

This is no Newton’s Binomial, but rather quite simple and understandable things. Through evolution, Homo sapiens acquired an incredibly developed capacity for imaginative thinking, unmatched by any other known animal today. It is precisely this capacity that allows us to invent real cures for cancer, AIDS, restore sight to the blind, help the paralyzed feel and communicate again, and even make dreams of flying to Mars a reality. But at the same time, this same ability allows us to easily “stitch” in our minds the real feeling of fear with something that poses no direct physical threat — only an image in our head.

An example? Here you go: seeing images and hearing emotional sounds and speeches depicting, say, the murder of a child — whether real or not — the average person will involuntarily feel grief, loss, regret, compassion, hatred, contempt, and outrage.

To keep society more or less constantly in a state of existential anxiety (to be or not to be), all it takes — given human psychological traits — is to “virtually recreate” and broadcast (which is fairly easy, considering the frequent monopoly over major channels of information distribution) the idea that the country is constantly surrounded by enemies who aim to destroy or humiliate it.

For instance, Russian authorities regularly claim that NATO is expanding eastward, thereby threatening the country’s security. But if one thinks without emotion, the mere physical placement of military assets in some countries no longer constitutes an immediate threat. Frankly, in today’s military context, how far or near something is located no longer matters much. The difference in the “flight” of a ballistic missile by a few seconds is hardly relevant, given that many countries have more than enough such missiles and launch points. As a side note, there are officially nine nuclear-armed states in the world, with a combined total of about 12,000–13,000 warheads — as reported by Reuters. The same NATO countries have never attacked Russia militarily, not even when Russian missiles fell or flew over NATO territory — they didn’t even invoke Article 5, merely scrambled some jets in response.

In China, it is common to declare that Western values and democracy are a threat to Chinese cultural and social stability. Yet at the same time, the core of China’s state income — which enables it to undercut foreign markets — depends critically on Europe and the U.S.

Since its foundation in the late 1940s, the North Korean regime has constantly claimed that the country is under threat of attack from South Korea and the United States.

These narratives of portraying society as humiliated and besieged — “we are encircled by enemies,” “everyone is against us,” “we are merely defending ourselves,” “we must not let our values be taken,” “we’re restoring justice,” “they trample our traditions,” “we are being oppressed,” “we are misunderstood and unjustly humiliated,” “we are the true defenders of humanity, and they want to take that from us” — these narratives sustain a constant state of fear and anxiety, allowing leaders to consolidate personal power and suppress civil liberties.

Thus, the three models — patrimonial, political-legal, and civic — describe not only historical forms of power but also levels of social maturity. Patrimonialism reproduces the archaic instinct of belonging and hierarchy, as seen in aggressive chimpanzees. Political nationhood requires recognition of formal rules, institutions, and shared citizenship — it is possible when the majority trusts the system. Civil society is the most advanced stage, where rules are not just obeyed but where a culture of participation, mutual support, and public dialogue is formed. This is the space where not just survival, but development is possible.

Fear and Environment: The Key to Transformation

As shown in the author’s article, environment and mass fear can instantly drag a society down from a reasoning civic space to a reactive patrimonial hierarchy. When threats appear, genetic programs of defense, domination, and closure are activated. A society, like an individual, becomes reactive and risks regressing into the archetype of a pack. And vice versa: a prolonged state of security and fairness can activate cooperative, bonobo-like behavioral strategies.

Knowing our behavioral mechanisms is already half the antidote. As your humble servant writes in the conclusion of his article: “Peaceful people are not a utopia — they are also a part of us.” The task is to ensure that the environment makes that part — the norm.